Hi again guys, since I can't seem to get a reply posted to my last thread I guess I will start a new one here and see if it gets through. Thanks to all of your advice I have figured out what I am going to do and I thought I would lay it out and ask another question I have. I decided I will be going for a B.B.A Finance to a local College here starting next fall (transferring from community college after finishing Associates.) Anyway, my situation is that I also want to work towards earning the accounting credits I will need to pursue my CPA after graduating and I want to get them done concurrent with the 2 years I'm spending on my Finance degree. In other words I want to graduate after the 2 years with 120 credits of my degree + 30 credits of the accounting I will need to sit for the CPA. Here is the problem though. I contacted LSU to see about earning their accounting certificate during these two years but they have informed me I must already posses a Bachelors in order to be admitted to the certificate program. I find this very odd because I could simply take all the classes and not get the cert but for some reason they wont give me the cert. I asked if I take them all then apply for admission to the certificate program could I do that? They told me no. So my choices become: - Take all the classes and say screw the actual certificate, at least I have the 24 credits the day I graduate and can ALMOST sit for the CPA in NV. OR - Wait until I graduate and then try to bang out those 24 credits, which likely means It'll be another year if not MORE before I can even take the CPA exam. Not to mention I still need my 2 years public accounting experience to be licensed, and no one is going to hire me to do that with a B.B.A Finance. Thats why I want that certificate and 24 credits the day I graduate so I can get a public accounting job and start knocking out the 2 years experience req. Other info: My school doesn't offer dual major accounting/finance What path would you tell me to take? What if I took all the credits that LSU offers for distance learning accounting (I think its 21 or 24, only 18 for the cert. i believe) and then just listed that on my resume? I mean I wont have the certificate but I will have taken just as much accounting as a person who majored in it with a B.S. accounting AND more than a person with the LSU cert. AKA is the actual certificate worth a damn? Is it worth an extra year of my life. I'm already 25...28/29ish when I graduated. If i was 20 I'd say whatever, but I'm getting old. TY ALL
Why not just pursue a BBA in Accounting rather than finance? Does your school not offer accounting at all or just not as a double major? As I mentioned in the previous thread, many of the finance courses may count towards the business education requirements to sit for the CPA exam, but they won't count towards the accounting requirements. Or do you plan on pursuing a Masters in Accountancy? If you do, you can quickly apply to a grad school after you finish your bachelors and list on your resume "Master of Accountancy (In Progress)" when you start applying for jobs. This is exactly what I'm intending to do since I'm currently pursuing a BBA in General Business. If you can't major in accounting, you should do the following: Pursue the BBA in Finance while taking LSU's accounting courses concurrently. Try to utilize LSU's accounting credits to fulfill the free elective requirements of the BBA in Finance, and then enroll in a Masters in Accountancy program soon after you graduate. The masters degree would actually be slightly overkill as you would exceed the CPA requirements, but it would look good on your resume. Plus, you would likely be able to land a job or sit for the CPA exam before you even finish the masters. You could pursue the masters part-time if you'd like.
I have not looked at this in detail but my overall impression is that the certificate/diploma/grad diploma programs offered by Australian universities seems to have a higher degree of uniformity (requirements, etc.) that in the USA.
Hey thanks for the reply. What you are saying does make sense, and I don't think my school has accounting as a major but I will check. My only concern about what youre saying is isnt the masters in accountancy a little bit of overkill as you stated? If I already have 24 credits in accounting from LSU and only need 6 more to sit for the CPA, why take a masters for those 6? Wouldnt I be better off with an MBA or something? Thank you very much for the response though, it has given me a bit to think about.
